


little pearl, you think you're in gold

by friedgalaxies



Category: Soul Eater
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Alternate Universe - Supernatural Elements, Demon Summoning, Demons
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-08
Updated: 2020-01-08
Packaged: 2021-02-27 05:47:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,209
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22172038
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/friedgalaxies/pseuds/friedgalaxies
Summary: “This is, collectively, the worst idea we’ve ever had.”A little bit of a boredom, an old book, a ouija board, and Halloween. What the hell could go wrong?Summoning an actual demon, apparently.
Comments: 6
Kudos: 52





	little pearl, you think you're in gold

“This is, collectively, the worst idea we’ve ever had.”

Liz’s voice trembled as she spoke, crouched on the cement floor of Maka’s basement between Patty and Black Star, legs slowly losing feeling through the worn fabric of her jeans. Black Star rolled his eyes, fixing Liz with a cocky grin that felt like it should’ve split his scarred face in two way before now. A scar from what had been entirely too close of a call during a knife fight, as he claimed, stretched over his upper lip and across the bottom curve of his cheek.

“Don’t worry Liz, nothing’s gonna happen, it’s all hokey-hoo-hah shit,” he claimed, arrogance ever evident in his overly boisterous voice. His words echoed around the walls of the unfinished basement. Doubt flicker-flashed across his face, almost too quick to notice. “Besides, even if we do summon something, I can beat its ass into the ground before you can even piss your pants in fear. Nothing defeats the great Black Star!”

“Yeah, yeah,” Maka huffed, blowing an errant strand of ash-blonde bangs from her eye, flicking the lighter she’d nabbed from her papa’s coat pocket till it sparked with a bristling orange flame. She started lighting the ring of black and white candles with methodical motions, the circle they’d set up around the decrepit, splintered ouija board alternating between the two colors like segments of zebra stripes.

 _Or maybe the bars of a jail cell_ , Liz thought with a shiver.

“I’m sort of with Liz here. Are you sure this is a good idea?” Tsubaki poised tentatively, long legs folded beneath her and hands fisted in the knees of her leggings.

“Nope!” Maka chirruped, sitting back on her heels with an uncharacteristically devious grin. A noise died in Tsubaki’s throat, fine brows furrowing. Despite herself, Liz wanted to reach out and smooth the wrinkle in the center of her forehead with the pad of her calloused thumb, even though she was shaking like she’d just stepped into an industrial freezer, herself. “Soul, you got the salt?”

Soul gave an affirmative grunt, tipping the oversized container of table salt in her direction. He was entirely too relaxed for what they were about to do, in Liz’s opinion. Of course her little sister and their friends would rope her into something as risky and stupid as this, and on Halloween, of all nights.

Patty knocked her head gently against the side of Liz’s own, likely sensing her discomfort in the tense of her muscles where their thighs pressed together, her bare upper arms prickling with goosebumps against Patty’s firm, still biceps.

“Don’t worry, Sissy. I promise nothing spooky is gonna happen. Besides, even if we do summon some kinda spooky thing, it’s not like its gonna choose you to eat first when Black Star’s fat ass is right there.”

Liz grimaced through the background noise of Black Star’s indignant shout. “Thanks, Pat. Really feeling the love, here.”

“Alright!” Maka proclaimed, flipping open to a dogeared page in a book that looked just about to fall apart at the seams, whisper-thin pages crinkling as she turned them, brown and curling like onion skin underneath the pads of her thin fingers. “No one break the salt circle.”

With that, she began reading aloud from the book, two fingers poised on the planchette of the chipped ouija board in front of her that had once undoubtedly been an immaculate, intricate thing. The latin was heavy on her tongue, lips tripping over the unfamiliar syllables, though she didn’t falter, brow creased in concentration. Liz pressed further into Patty, who patted her thigh comfortingly in return.

The room seemed to grow cold as Maka read, green eyes unyielding even as the candles flickered and Tsubaki gasped aloud. A sense of unease roiled in the pit of Liz’s gut and she wanted nothing more to flee the room, but found herself rooted to the spot, something like fear and anticipation prickling along her nerves, a foreign feeling of _something_ digging twisted claws into her very veins. The candles flickered, flashed, the flames grew into spears of twisting bronze and gold, wax melting in thick rivulets down the fat, squat bodies of the candles.

“Maka!” Soul shouted, struggling to his knees, looking like he wanted nothing more than to shoot to his feet and rip the book from beneath her fingers. “Maka, stop reading!”

“I-I can’t!” she stammered, voice a high note of anxiety above the burbling, roiling mutter of a chant in a voice that was no longer only her own, like steaming ocean waves crashing against the base of a crumbling cliff. Liz stood on the precipice, toes curling into shattering rock, shards collapsing into the sea beneath her feet. Yet she couldn’t move, enraptured by the force of nature miles beneath her, spears of towering rock swallowed beneath the anger of an old god, thrashing in a wordless rage through the motions of the sea.

Maka began reading again, louder, voice taking on an unnatural timbre, like the echoes after a glass shattered had been plucked from the air and spun into words. Something growled.

The room flickered red, and no matter how hard Liz blinked and begged with whatever was listening for it to stop, to go back to normal, it remained, like the spots in her vision after a flashlight had been shone directly into her eyes. Patty trembled, and for all the world Liz felt like she was all of thirteen and Patty, barely eight, was clinging to her sleeve in the face of a world far, far bigger than them.

The chanting, muttering something that had stolen Maka’s voice died down, planchette moving of its own accord beneath her fingers in frenetic circles. The roaring candle flames converged into a single, twisting tornado of fire, then died just as quickly, nothing left behind but curtains of smoke.

Through the smoke, a door opened, and Something reached out with a pale hand, shining, dark shoes on a lintel of smoke.

Liz screamed.

When she woke, which she was assured was only moments later, Liz was greeted with the sight of a man she’d never seen before floating several inches above the ground, fixing suspiciously bone-white cufflinks on the cuffs of a finely tailored suit inkier black than the night sky over Death City, Nevada.

He was thin, but not very tall, possibly five-and-a-half feet at most. His skin was so pale, so white, it was a mystery he was even alive enough to fill out the crisp suit he wore. A skull shaped lapel pin was pinned to the head of a generous cravat. Shiny, sharp toed dress shoes that likely cost more than Liz herself glinted in what was now low candle light, most of them having burnt to stubs during the otherworldly ordeal, and no one had yet mustered up the courage to stand and flick the lights on. Though with the way Liz felt glued to the floor still, palms of her hands pressed against the unfinished cement flooring despite the cold that bit into her bones, maybe they couldn’t.

Smoke rolled in billowing waves off his shoulders, the fine bones of his hands, dripping down his fingertips like water and dissipating before it hit the ground with a faint hiss. The paranormal stranger turned gold eyes over each of them, pupils careful concentric rings so deep they seemed carved into his very irises, dilating and adjusting like the sight of a sniper rifle, piercing gaze like that of one inspecting a fine cut of meat for purchase. He lifted a hand, silver rings flashing with something unnatural, dangerous, raking a hand through hair like spun strands of obsidian, dissipating into smoke around the edges like his firmly set shoulders.

His face was finely boned, almost delicate, though knowledge beyond all of their collective years seemed to radiate off his very being, at a clashing odds with the strangely youthful, nearly cherubic swell of his cheekbones underneath milky white-blue skin. Matte stripes of ivory white were painted with broad, even strokes over the left side of his head, like someone had been painting concentric rings on his hair to match the ones in his eyes and had given up exactly halfway through. They stayed stationary in space when he turned his head, almost like a mask held just so slightly above dark silk fibers, yet moved along with him when he took a step forward, patent leather shoes clicking against solid air like it was marble. He looked down at the salt circle around the ring of candles with the barest hint of disdain.

Liz was overcome with a sudden rush of anger. She wanted to punch his eerily, creepily calm face.

“Well, well,” he intoned, monotone like the moment just after being dunked into ice water and right before it began to fill your lungs through the shocked gape of your mouth. “What an interesting predicament I’ve found myself in, here.”

Tsubaki whimpered. Soul gaped. Maka stammered. Liz, once again, screamed.

“What the _fuck?_ ” Black Star all but shouted, breaking the tenuous silence like a steak knife cutting through a thread of spider silk. Quick, brusque, and entirely too forceful for the situation at hand.

“What the hell are you?” Soul whispered, braced back on his hands and trying in vain to gather his feet under him, but his legs shook and his socked feet slid against the smooth cement in vain. His headband had slipped down his forehead in the commotion, though he hadn’t seemed to notice. Liz didn’t blame him.

“‘What the hell’ indeed,” the man- creature- Thing chuckled low, dark, beneath a voice like the echo after a gunshot, smooth tenor just ever so slightly grating on the ear. His teeth were sharp, curved, like the pointed ends of fishhooks, when he smiled. “I cannot say I’m unsurprised you hadn’t the faintest what you were reading, but what’s done is done. What did you think was going to happen when you read directly from the Book of Eibon, after all?”

Maka’s voice trembled as she spoke, “I thought it was just a myth.”

The Thing made a flippant gesture, smoke rolling in seductive wisps off the tips of his fingers. The nails, surprisingly blunt, were painted a gold so shiny Liz couldn’t be sure it wasn’t just molten gold plating on the quicks of his nails, an eerie similarity to the ever shifting, ever moving color of his irises beneath the concentric circles. “There is a truth to every myth, no matter how small. Besides, if you were truly only looking for a bit of harmless fun on All Hallow’s Eve, you wouldn’t be using it at all.”

He sneered down at Maka, whose shaking hand was still braced on the planchette, other hand gripping the book like a lifeline, looking for all the world at her like she was nothing more than a bug on the underside of his shoe. “Neither that, or the spirit board of Arachne herself. How did you even obtain such a thing?”

“A-a thrift store?” Maka said, more of a question than a statement.

“A thrift store.” the Thing repeated, nose beginning to crinkle in barely withheld disgust. He gazed slowly, predatorial, around the room, gaze raking over each of them in turn like a scanner cataloging all of their information from blood type and date of birth to what they did on Saturdays-- this, apparently-- and their favorite food.

Type B-positive, March 23, 1999, and crab rangoon, by the way.

“What an eclectic gathering of children,” he purred, hands folded in the small of his back. His suit didn’t so much as wrinkle despite the movement, fabric so dark it was almost like a hole punched out of the very fabric of reality itself. There were lines painted over his mouth, thin, symmetrical stripes penned in over the curve of cherubic, pouty lips any of the girls at Liz’s salon would kill for, like the gaps between the teeth of an old skull. They shifted when he grinned, something macabre and intrigued with the barest hint of malice.

“You barely look old enough to be in high school yourself, pleb,” Black Star groused, voice shaking ever so slightly enough it was almost imperceptible.

The Thing rolled his eyes, gaze tilting momentarily skywards with the movement. “I am far older than that, I assure you. Older than the creation of time and the spawn of humans itself, really. But I wouldn’t expect your pitiful little mortal brain has the capability to grasp numbers so high, anyhow.”

Liz knew Black Star definitely couldn’t. He was failing Geometry in a fashion so spectacular it was almost impressive.

“But, if you foolish children are calling me here, I might as well make it worth my time, at least.” He produced a scroll from nowhere with a flick of the wrist, yellowed parchment rolled around thick-ended dowels with curved handles for the express purpose of rolling and unrolling. A quill, heavy with the plumage of what Liz could only assume was a white peacock feather, apparated in his hand with a snap of twisting reality, ink thick and oily in the nib. “Let’s make a deal, shall we?”

**Author's Note:**

> this is just a small thing i whipped up that didn't really have an plot planned, but if enough people take an interest in it, then i'm willing to continue it! i hope you enjoyed! comments, questions, and concrit are always appreciated ^v^


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